We haunt every medium we make.

June 19, 2014

Mommy murderblog

A blogger committed murder and covered it up, partially to boost readership. She also did this for the sympathy, as the victim was her son, apparently. It's another real-life Gothic horror tale.

The crime involved poisoning over a long period of time, sickening the little boy. Descriptions of his suffering elicited expressions of emotional support and many server hits for the alleged murderer's mommyblog:

Investigators suspect the single mother may have poisoned her child at least twice, once before his seizures and again when his sodium spiked...

But they also suspect his medical abuse went back much further — fueled by the social media attention she gained on Facebook, Twitter and blogs, according to local news reports.

The murder took place in hospital and involved salt, that classic banisher:

In January, the boy was admitted to Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital in Valhalla, New York, when doctors noted that his sodium levels were shooting up in a way that was “metabolically impossible” for his body to do on its own. Assistant District Attorney Doreen Lloyd said in court on Tuesday that Lacey Spears would wait for hospital personnel to leave, then inject high doses of sodium into the Garnett’s gastric feeding tube.

This is a horrible story. One aspect of the horror is the jarring antimaternal sense of mother murdering a child. We might recall a similar, fictional story at the center of The Sixth Sense (1999).

There is also the Muchausen-by-proxy element, whereby a person creates a false (because inflicted, not organic) illness in order to win sympathy.

And, of course, the fearsome internet dimension. This was done for a blog, after all, that hated and feared subfloor of the internet.